Milwaukee, Wisconsin. February 12th, 1992.

Dr. Park Dietz (forensic psychiatrist and the prosecution’s final star witness) has been testifying at the trial of Wisconsin v. Jeffrey Dahmer for close to two hours.

To summarise the doctor’s testimony so far:

• Dr. Dietz has laid out his extensive credentials for the benefit of the jury – including his work with mentally disordered offenders, research on sexual deviations, and his current¹ position as a Psychiatry professor at the University of California. Dietz has also previously testified in several high profile cases (John Hinckley Jr., Walter Leroy Moody, et al.) and worked closely with the FBI.

• Dietz spent 18 hours interviewing the defendant – as well as studying a multitude of files, documents and locations connected to the crimes and Dahmer’s confession. He even viewed some of the same pornography and horror films which Dahmer had been drawn to or had found significant.

• Dietz believes Dahmer appreciated the wrongfulness of his conduct during his crimes. Not only because Dahmer himself said he knew such behaviour was wrong, but because he’d actively taken steps to make sure he was alone with a victim or could not be traced directly to one (eg: telling drivers to drop him and the victim off some blocks away from his apartment; disposing of victims ID’s after their death; admitting he would not have killed had his grandmother seen him with a potential victim; etc.)

• Dahmer needed to drink in order to overcome his natural inhibition against killing and the killings themselves were not impulsive. Dahmer knew beforehand² that he was going to kill someone and would make sure he killed mostly on weekends – when he’d have enough time to lay with the victim before disposing of them.

• Dietz believed Dahmer suffered from two types of mental disorder: Alcohol dependence and Paraphilia (‘paraphilia’ being an enduring sexual interest in something abnormal). An individual may have more than one paraphilia and most paraphiles don’t commit crimes to satisfy these sexual desires.
  
  In Dietz’s words:

“The paraphilia provides no more than the motive for what a person would like to do. It does not determine whether the person does it, it does not impair an individual’s appreciation of wrongfulness, nor does it impair an individual’s capacity to conform [their] conduct. It only determines what it is one wishes to do.”

Dr. Dietz now continues to answer the questions put to him by prosecuting attorney, Michael McCann.

---

Enduring Interests

MICHAEL MCCANN: Can you tell us what paraphilic interests Mr. Dahmer has?

DR. PARK DIETZ: Well, technically – looking at the DSM-III-R and our approach to it – one would point to several very specific paraphilias that are described. However, there’s a broader approach under which there’s far more to say about Mr. Dahmer’s particular interests.

Sticking to the more technical approach to it, the three paraphilias that I think he meets the criteria for are:

First, necrophilia. Because for more than six months, Mr. Dahmer had fantasies of – and a desire to have – sexual contact with corpses (and, in fact, did so). And so that qualifies as necrophilia.

Secondly, frotteurism – which refers to the desire to rub up against someone else without their consent. The evidence for that is that there were occasions when Mr. Dahmer did that to strangers at Summerfest, in which he would go around people (where they were playing rock and roll and drinking beer) and he would rub up. He’d find a man with an attractive physique and rub up against him. He did that on several occasions.

But, more importantly, he did this with the men that he brought back to his apartment. Including the ones who became the victims of the crimes with which he’s charged. And the rubbing up against men he had drugged in bathhouses, hotels, at his grandmothers or at the apartment – whether he killed them or not – rubbing up against men when they’re drugged is rubbing against an unconsenting partner. And therefore that’s frotteurism. And he did that for more than six months.

And the third one, that I think one might say he has, requires a little bit more of an explanation.

DSM-III-R makes mention of a paraphilia known as partialism. Partialism is an older term and (if my memory is correct on this) I think it may have been I who recommended we put it back in the book. I don’t recall clearly on that, but I think I argued in favour of it.

Originally, the idea of partialism was to distinguish it from fetishism – where a fetish is some inanimate object that the person finds attractive.

In partialism, it is a part of the human body that one finds attractive. The most familiar kinds of partialism that many clinicians have seen (and that are the subject of jokes on shows like Night Court) are foot fetishism or hair fetishism, as these used to be called. Under DSM-III-R, those would be called ‘partialism’ rather than a fetish, because it’s a part of the human body that’s sexually attractive. Namely feet or hair.

For example, Mr. Dahmer told me about a man he had encountered at a bathhouse who apparently had a foot fetish. The man would, for prolonged periods of time, give other men’s feet a massage by taking the other man’s foot in his mouth and he would suck on the other man’s foot and massage it with his mouth for a prolonged period. That would be suggestive that such an individual had a foot fetish. Or, in current terms, ‘partialism with respect to feet.’

In the case of hair: Of course it’s normal for hair to be appealing and there’s an entire industry devoted to making it so. But where men find hair by itself appealing and (for example) will cut the hair from a woman’s head in a crowded place, or in a library, and then go home and masturbate while holding and fondling the hair or looking at it, that’s partialism. It’s only a part of the person that becomes the focus of attention.

Well, I think that partialism could be applied to describe Mr. Dahmer’s enduring interest in one particular part of the human body. Namely the internal organs.

Somewhere along the line he acquired a sexual attraction to the appearance of the viscera (which, of course, do have a striking appearance). And, as we described what about it he found appealing, it’s my understanding that what he found appealing was the glistening surfaces of the tissues. The fact that they were colourful. And although partialism is usually referring to things on the exterior of the body, perhaps the term applies here.

And if it doesn’t, then it would be one of the other paraphilias, not otherwise specified. And the Greek name that might be used for that would be splanchnophilia – where splanchno refers to the viscera and philia the attraction to it.

I’m not aware of anyone else using that term, but several other times when someone’s introduced some Greek term for a paraphilia, it turns out that someone else had used the term twenty years ago for the same thing – or in the last century – because there’s nothing new about any of these conditions. Nor is Mr. Dahmer’s the first case of someone with that particular sexual attraction to the appearance of viscera.

Those are the particular patterns that I gave diagnostic labels to, but I don’t think that tells the whole story of Mr. Dahmer’s sexual interests because there’s really a more important theme, even than those. And that is (and what I believe he has consistently indicated and his actions are consistent with) the idea that:

What is most appealing sexually to him is having control over another human in such a way that he can make primarily gentle uses of their body, sexually.

Preferences for a Partner

The favourite activities he describes are what he often refers to as “light sex”. Kissing, touching, rubbing, hugging. The kinds of activities that would (between consenting adults) often amount to foreplay are things that he has emphasised with victims and with other partners. Those were activities – and those are normal activities with a consenting adult – that give him pleasure and that he always enjoyed. But he describes difficulty in getting partners to restrict themselves to just that because the partners that he found most often wanted to do more than that. And one of the things more than that – that some of them wanted to do – was to have anal sex with him, which he did not like. Having had a few painful experiences, he did not want to be in that position.

Also, the partners that he was able to find universally had a deadline when they had to leave. And he was unable to spend as much time as he wanted doing these more gentle, ordinary activities with them.

That desire to be able to do those things with the men he found attractive is, I think, central to his desire to be able to keep them in some way where he could continue to do those things without having demands on him that were difficult to meet, or painful, or that he didn’t want to meet without having a deadline by which it had to be done. And so he devoted a considerable amount of his energy to finding a way to be able to have someone – or, if not someone, something – that could serve that role for him as being the person (or body or part) with whom he could have such gentle activies as rubbing, touching, hugging, masturbation, kissing and fondling.

And it’s in the course of trying to find a way to keep a person for that, that he engages in most of the more extreme behaviours surrounding the killings for which he’s charged.

If I understood what Mr. Dahmer told me correctly (and we spent a lot of time on this during my examination), his preference – his first choice – would have been always to be able to have a living, breathing and consenting partner who permitted him to engage in all of these ‘light sex’ (to use his term) activities. Which were his favourite. And, in fact, he said to me that if any of the victims had agreed to stay with him for several weeks then he would not have killed them. If they’d agreed to stay and do these things.

And there were a few whom he found particularly appealing – because the physique was so close to his ideal – that had he been able to have a continuing relationship with those men, he felt he would have had no need for any of the rest of what he did [and] no particular desire to do it.

Likewise, there were a couple ideal men in videos – whom he pointed out to me and described what it was about the physique he liked – which, had they been available to him as consenting partners, would have been all that he wanted or felt a need for to fulfil himself sexually. But those ideal men weren’t obtainable and the men who came as close to it as he found (such as Mr. Sears) were going to have to leave by a deadline. They had some time they had to go.

So, if he couldn’t have them in that way – as a consenting, continuing partner – the second best way would be to have them in some other state in which they would remain with him and still be available for these activities.

And the second choice that would be best for him (he thought) would have been if he could have had one of them whose will had been destroyed. He wanted to be able to take one of the men and make it so that that man had no will of his own.

The term he used to describe these people with no free will – that he wanted to create – was ‘zombies.’ And he tried two techniques for the creation of zombies.

The point of having a zombie was that he would have a living, breathing, warm human. And one of the things he liked about that was that this interest in the viscera led him to enjoy listening to the sounds of the internal organs, listening to the heartbeat [and] listening to the sounds that an abdomen makes. Hearing the body sounds was both reassuring and exciting to him, and so he would ask victims if he could listen to them, or he would ask partners that. And after drugging men it’s one of the things he would do – listen to their body sounds.

But with the zombie – had he succeeded – he thought he’d be able to continue to do all the things he liked, including that.

And the two techniques he actually tried were, of course: Drilling into the skull and injecting acid into what he thought would be the frontal lobe region and, likewise, drilling into the skull and injecting boiling water into the frontal lobe region.

He [also] considered another possibility – which was drilling a hole more at the top of the skull, inserting some electrical apparatus and plugging this into the wall to try to use electricity to achieve the goal. But he felt he lacked the technical knowledge of electricity to do this and told me he didn’t really know how to make a switch or a rheostat, but that he’d thought about the idea.

The purpose here was to have someone who wouldn’t leave him, who wouldn’t make demands, who wouldn’t turn him in. Who would do none of these other problematic things, and yet who would be available as a sexual partner. And so, in that sense, what these zombies would be would be sex slaves who meet his particular sexual desires.

And Mr. Dahmer is not the first paraphilic, nor the first serial killer, to wish to create sex slaves and to take steps to try to create such persons who would be available for his sexual use.

His third choice – and one that he often got, really – was an unconscious partner. Because someone who is unconscious (but alive) allows him to do all of those things that he likes to do – like kissing, rubbing, listening to body sounds, touching and hugging. And, of course, that he did many times at bathhouses, a number of times at hotels (to which he took men from the bars), with all of the victims whom he’s charged with killing, and with some of the people who got away.

And that activity of drugging them allows him a period of hours (when he uses the dose he preferred) during which he can engage in all of these activities with an individual without having demands made on him. Without having somebody who’s going to get up and leave in the middle of what he’s enjoying, [and] where he has enough time to masturbate several times and to fulfil himself sexually in all of these ways.

That unconscious victim mode was, of course, his principal means of gratification for some period when he was going to the bathhouses a lot. But he continued to use that with the other victims and – while not as good as the consenting, awake partner who was compliant with all this – it was certainly sufficiently fulfilling for him.

The problem, of course, is that keeping them unconscious long enough would be difficult to do. Keeping them alive while unconscious would be difficult to do. And if they regain consciousness sufficiently, they may escape and may turn him in for doing it (as in fact nearly happened earlier and did happen eventually).

His next choice after that (and one he only thought about and went to the library to look into briefly) was that, if he could find one man with a sufficiently attractive physique to keep it permanently while dead, that would be useful because he could do many of the things he wanted (though not quite all).

And what he considered was something he heard about on a TV show…

When we discussed it, we both thought we might have seen it on 60 Minutes, but neither he nor I am sure of the particular show. But one show did something on people who freeze-dried their pets and Mr. Dahmer’s idea was that, if he could get the apparatus for that and freeze-dry a man of the appropriate physique, he’d at least be able to continue to have him to look at while masturbating [and] to pose, perhaps, in various positions (if they were flexible enough in that state), fondle, rub, hug, [and] touch.

They would not have sounds to listen to, but they would have a lot of what he was interested in.

And he thought that if he’d been able to freeze-dry one of the more attractive men he would not have had a desire for the other victims.

The step he took was to go to the library and, in a magazine he thought was called Taxidermy, he found an advertisement from a supplier of the equipment for freeze-drying animals. [He] found that there were two sizes of the machines. One of which seemed like it might be large enough for humans but the cost was prohibitive. It cost $30,000 or so, he thought, and so that was not an available option.

The next best choice was that of a fresh corpse.

Now, the fresh corpse (like the freeze-dried person) has the problem of not having any sounds to listen to, but it has the additional problem that it will not stay fresh and that decomposition is a risky business because of the accompanying odours. And he had close calls because of the odours at the apartment [and] with [nearly] getting caught.

Still, when he committed the killings with which he’s charged, the availability then of a fresh corpse was such that he made use of that sexually (in at least most of the instances) for the few days where it was feasible to do that.

And that use of those corpses, and his interest in that and these other activities, underlines my diagnosis of necrophilia. Even though it wasn’t his preferred activity – certainly not his exclusive activity – it was a compromise to what he would rather have been doing. But an acceptable compromise that he employed a number of times.

And he actually did consider obtaining corpses through other means, having (at one point) looked at the obituaries to try to spot notices of the death of young males (and by ‘young’ here, I mean late adolescent to young adults – he’s never had any known interest in children under 12). But that attraction to men from 16 to 25³… If he could find one who died recently, he thought he might be able to obtain access to the corpse.

And he, in fact, went to two funerals in pursuit of that goal. One where there was a closed casket, and so he didn’t know if the man would have been attractive. The other where there was an open casket, and he told me that he did find that young man attractive and subsequently went to the cemetery at night with the plan of digging up the grave and having access to that corpse. But the ground was too hard because of the cold weather and so he couldn’t dig. And it got frightening in the cemetery because he heard typical horror movie sounds of a dog barking and an owl hooting – and so he got out of there and was unable to use that means.

Control and Controlling Suffering

Lastly (along this spectrum of people, bodies or parts under his control) was the other uses he made of those whom he, in fact, had killed. And here he told me that he made use of the viscera for masturbation, by opening the victims in the course of dismembering them.

And there was a particular phase of dismemberment where he would stop sometimes to take photographs, sometimes to masturbate, sometimes both. And that was upon opening the abdomen – when the abdominal viscera are first exposed. And he would masturbate while looking at that.

And that was a long-standing image, as far as I could determine. That was an interest he had had since late in high school, and this gave him occasion to make use of that particular image. And that’s basically the spectrum of controlling another person.

Now, to call all of that just ‘necrophilia’ really sort of misses the mark, but it’s the best word we have at the moment for it.

We’d be better off having some other term that describes this whole range of wanting to have someone under control, [but] the reason we don’t is that the issue arises for all the paraphilias. In every paraphilia what the paraphile wants is to be able to do this favourite thing – or this special thing- without much regard to whether other people like that or find it appealing.

The paraphile wants to do it when he wants to do it on his own terms – and so there’s always some issue of control with all the paraphilias. And secondly, in the case of some of the paraphilias, there’s a really overt, obvious interest in controlling some person. Particularly in the paraphilias related to rape and to sexual sadism, there is an overt, conscious desire to control and cause harm to another human.

But Mr. Dahmer is different from that because, as far as I could tell, his statements were always consistent to me, and his behaviour (at least up until Tracy Edwards⁴ [and] as far as it can be adduced from all the evidence) was such that he did not torture his victims and took steps to prevent them from suffering. Whereas in sadism, they take steps to promote suffering. Mr. Dahmer took steps to alleviate suffering and to ensure that the victims would not be experiencing pain.

So, control is a difficult concept with the paraphilias, present in some degree in all the paraphilias, and an important concept for Mr. Dahmer. But what he wanted was these more gentle activities with the other people.

MCCANN: We’ll talk a little later about the killing being something apart from the paraphilia. Something in which he did not take pleasure. Is that correct?

D: That’s right.

The Developing Mind

MCCANN: Did you form any opinion as to how Mr. Dahmer got this way? Acquired these paraphilias?

D: Well, I think the evidence that exists from his history – from talking to him – is suggestive of how he got this way. Specifically the timing of his first fantasies of such activities and what was going on in his life at the time.

The timing of his first fantasies (of bringing another person under his control in order to engage in sexual behaviours) was sometime during the high school years. At various times the specific age and grade that Mr. Dahmer has said this occurred has varied within a year or two, but it seems to be around age 15 or 16 that he first had sexual thoughts of striking another person and rendering him unconscious by a blow to the back of the neck and then making sexual use of the unconscious body.

The first time he tried, or meant, to act on that was when, at around that age, he found a particular male jogger attractive to him and he broke off a baseball bat and then concealed himself in some bush near where the jogger was expected to pass – with the idea that, if the jogger came by, he would strike him on the back of the neck, make him unconscious and enjoy the man’s body sexually for a time.

The jogger didn’t come by and so that didn’t come to pass and Mr. Dahmer never saw the man again. But that seems to be the first effort to put this fantasy into action.

But the fantasy always precedes the action, and so he must have had a fantasy of such things before he went to try to do it (and he acknowledges that he had the fantasy earlier).

It was also around that time that he told me he first had any sexual thoughts about viscera.

Now, if one tries to look at the origins of that, there are several things that seem possible origins of those paraphilic interests at that age:

One is that there was a ninth grade science project of dissecting a foetal pig. And while all the children had the project, it was Mr. Dahmer who obtained the teacher’s permission to take home what was left of the pig’s head. And at home, he made further use of it to try to preserve the skull. There was nothing overtly sexual about that activity for him. It didn’t sexually excite him, and he didn’t have sex in mind, but it was an exposure to that kind of contact with the tissue of a mammal that occurred around that time in his life that may have (and he acknowledges that this may have occurred) come into his mind at a time when he was, in fact, beginning to masturbate regularly and frequently.

In ninth grade – at about age 15 – he was approximately one year into his pubescent sexual activity. He’d engaged in some sex play with a neighbourhood boy about his age and he was masturbating on a regular basis – sometimes as often as two or three times a day at that period. And as boys will do when they masturbate, they think about various things.

And I believe the evidence on the paraphilias shows that what boys think about while they masturbate is often incorporated into their subsequent fantasies – and is often the origin of their later sexual interests. So what a boy repeatedly associates in his mind with sexual arousal becomes what he will want – for a very long time – to do sexually.

And so it may be that the thoughts of the foetal pig entered Mr. Dahmer’s mind just because he happened to have been doing that around the time he’s masturbating. The thought wanders into his mind and then it becomes sexualized. The next time he masturbates it’s a little more likely to enter his mind again and, if it enters his mind enough while he masturbates, eventually it comes to be a sexy thought – even though, a year earlier, the thought of tissue would not sexy to him anymore than it is to most people.

Another incident that occured around the same time is a class trip, in his junior year, to a museum (he thought it was in Akron, I believe the evidence indicates it’s in Cleveland) where he saw, for the first time, portions of a human body.

At the museum, he saw what are known as ‘transverse sections’ of the body. These are used for anatomical study (and every medical student goes through the initial experience of some revulsion at seeing these and eventually having to study them to learn the anatomy). But the preparations are made by preserving a human cadaver and then slicing very thin sections of the cadaver and preserving those slices in such a way that they can be seen. Mr. Dahmer saw these slices of human body at the museum and he, and the others, stood around looking at these slices of human body for about half an hour.

He told me he hadn’t thought of that particular incident in years until I asked him about it and he was surprised to remember it. And although he does not recall that entering his masturbation fantasies, allowed how that too may have had some influence here.

Likewise, it was around the same age (I think around ninth grade) that he was struck by a group of boys. There were some seniors from school who saw him walking home one night and struck him in the back of the neck with – what at one point he said was a billy club, at another point described as a blackjack. But whatever it was, someone hit him in the back of the neck and he ran home terrified about that.

And that was a significant event to him, for which he had some fantasies of retaliation and some emotional response to having been a victim of that.

Likewise, it was around this time that Mr. Dahmer did engage in some dissection of animals that he’d brought home if he spotted them killed along the road.

In one instance, he was playing something of a practical joke on his friends and he set up a bizarre scene in the woods with a dog’s head on a tree and led his friends there without telling them that he’d put it there so they’d feel as if they all discovered it at once. Because he wanted to scare them.

But at other times, on his own, he would do a dissection – chiefly for the goal of getting the bones. Which he thought he might sometime assemble and preserve in a skeleton.

As far as I could tell, Mr. Dahmer was not sexually aroused by those activities, but found there was some excitement in doing something that unusual. He found some discovery there the first time he (and this is much earlier) cut a fish and saw the bright orange colour of the egg sac. He was surprised at that. And later, when he saw the colour of organs inside a mammal, that was a surprise. And there was some excitement in doing this, but he didn’t consciously recognise it as sexual and it probably therefore wasn’t.

However, somewhere (and probably at that time) these things became sexualised to him – which is a way of saying that he learned to think of these odd things as sexy where most people don’t find these things sexy.

MCCANN: And you indicated you wanted to qualify this discussion about the causation. You wanted to add some qualifying remarks on that?

D: Yes. I should point out that I can’t offer an opinion with reasonable medical certainty of the precise origins of Mr. Dahmer’s paraphilias but, as far as I can determine, it’s the events at that time of his life that led to his acquiring the paraphilias.

MCCANN: Just so the jury understands, this qualifier applies just to the causation – the youthful causation – that caused the connection (the sexual stimulus) with those particular activities. Is that correct?

D: Yes, because there’s still some debate in the profession as to the causes of paraphilias.

A Question of Action

MCCANN: Does the fact that Dahmer had these paraphilic interests require that he act on them?

D: No, having paraphilic interests means nothing more than what it is that will produce, in the male, an erection.

The paraphilia is a description of what is sexually exciting. Whether one acts to seek out that image in varying ways is not determined by the paraphilia, but by other aspects of one’s life, one’s morals, one’s character, whether one drinks. All these other things.

But I think it is important to point out that acquiring a paraphilia is generally not a matter of choice. Mr. Dahmer couldn’t help what became sexy to him or couldn’t have known, at that point in his life, how to control that.

And what remained attractive to him over the years was as much an inherent part of him as any human’s idea of what is sexy becomes an inherent part of that person. And we don’t generally choose what we will find sexy. It happens to us in ways we’re not quite aware of.

What humans do choose is whether they will act on their sexual interests or not. And, in the same way that an individual chooses whether to reach out and touch each attractive person he sees, a paraphile is able to decide whether to reach out and do those things that will gratify his attractions.

Personality of the Paraphile

MCCANN: What is the role of character in a person who has a paraphilia?

D: Well, character largely determines – for paraphiles and everyone else – how they will go about their lives and how they will behave themselves.

In psychiatry, we use now the term ‘personality traits’ to describe enduring ways people tend to respond to the world. And if individuals have personality traits that cause them problems or get them in trouble or that make them unhappy or that lead to their being unfulfilled in life, we will sometimes give a diagnosis of a personality disorder – which refers to nothing more than a set of personality traits that are causing distress or getting people in trouble.

When individuals have personality disorders or when they’ve got some strong personality traits that are not functional [and which] don’t work too well in the world, then they may get in trouble with the law as they go about their business.

In the case of a paraphile, because there’s always this interest in doing the sexual activity that’s desired (or at least whenever the sex drive is there), the interest is there to do the thing they find sexually attractive. If there’s also a problem with character, they may commit crimes in order to fulfil the sexual desire.

M:CANN And that problem with character is separate, and a thing apart, from the paraphilia, is that correct?

D: That’s right.

MCANN: Are most sex criminals both sexually deviant and possessed of some antisocial personality characteristics, or traits?

D: I wouldn’t use the word ‘possessed’ here. That conjures up some other images. But it is true that most sex criminals have both – well, leaving aside rapists for the moment. Other [non rapist] sex offenders (most of whom are paraphilic) have both a paraphilia and a personality disorder of some kind. Most commonly an antisocial personality disorder, but I don’t think Mr. Dahmer has an antisocial personality disorder.

MCANN: You will speak to some of his personality traits later on in your conclusionary remarks, [and how they] affected and interplaced with the paraphilia. Is that correct?

D: Probably.

Lowering Inhibitions

MCANN: What role does alcohol play in Mr. Dahmer’s situation? And how did that interface with his paraphilia and with his character?

D: Well, in Mr. Dahmer’s case, his drinking was very important in understanding the crimes with which he’s charged.

The way that paraphilic offenders who aren’t character disordered get to be offenders, instead of law-abiding people, is often because of substance abuse.

Because the paraphilia doesn’t cause anyone to commit a crime, we have to ask ourselves: Why is it that some paraphiles commit crimes?

Well, some do because they’re bad people. They have an antisocial personality disorder and they don’t care about anyone else, so they just do it.

Some do because they’re alcoholic and they lower their inhibitions with drinking and then do these things they want to do. Others for other drugs or for other personality disorders.

But it’s not because of the paraphilia. It’s because of these other problems that lower their inhibitions – or that cause them not to have any inhibitions in the first place – that they’ll commit the crimes merely to satisfy themselves sexually.

In Mr. Dahmer’s case, I think the key element as to why he did not confine himself to fantasy and masturbation is that he was also drinking very heavily. Because of his alcohol abuse he was often lowering his inhibitions and, in that state, would find it capable to engage in a series of things that – without drinking – were very difficult for him.

To begin with, Mr. Dahmer is not a particularly extroverted person. He can speak comfortably to people – he’s not so inhibited from social contact that it makes him anxious just to have a conversation. He can carry on normal conversations with anyone and be polite and have no problem with that. But he was a private person and not very outgoing. Particularly as he was engaging in antisocial behaviour, he withdrew from other people. He saw the turning point as the Hicks homicide, I think, when he began to drink very heavily and withdraw from other people.

And so, from right after high school and on, he had been a heavy drinker much of the time and had had few (if any) close friends.

Now because he had few, or no, close friends after high school, it was a difficult thing for Mr. Dahmer to go meet someone to develop a sexual relationship [with]. And part of the reason he would drink on weekends was to be able to work up the courage to go and meet someone. In the same way that heterosexual men will sometimes go to a bar and have a few drinks before they would approach a woman – because they want to overcome some of this inhibition. It’s the same here.

But another reason he would drink is that, when was alone with those whom he meant to harm, he would have inhibitions against the killing that he would need to drink to overcome.

Now, that’s because Mr. Dahmer doesn’t have any paraphilia about killing people. He never did. He has paraphilias about doing gentle things with people and foreplay-like things with them – and I think he has a paraphilia about looking at viscera – but killing people is not a paraphilia for him. Nor is the actual dismemberment or disposal of corpses sexually appealing to him. Those were two things that he particularly disliked. He didn’t like to kill, and he didn’t like to dismember – though there was a piece of the mutilation that he liked, which is when you look at the abdomen. But the rest of it was hard work – and some of it was absolutely repulsive to him, just as it would be to anyone, until he desensitised himself by doing it so often that it was just a dirty job.

And he would drink to overcome the inhibitions against those two unattractive aspects of this process: the killing and the dismemberment. And he told me that he would always drink to overcome inhibitions against killing and to overcome inhibitions against dismemberment.

MCANN: So then the killing itself was not a part of the paraphilia?

D: No.

MCCANN: Okay, because I phrased it negatively, let me rephrase it… Is the killing a part of the paraphilia?

D: Not for Mr. Dahmer it isn’t.

* A scheduled weekly test of the building’s bomb siren marks an impromptu place for a court reccess *

---

Sources:

• Court TV

Transcribing is time-consuming and can be a financial expense. If you find this transcript useful, please consider referencing me. I’d really appreciate it! 🙂

Footnotes:

1. At the time of the trial ↩︎
2. With the exception of his first two victims. At just 18-years-old, Dahmer had picked up hitchhiker Steven Hicks, taken him back to Dahmer’s family home to drink beer, then impulsively killed him when Steven tried to leave. Nine years later, Dahmer had awoke at the Ambassador Hotel to find Steven Tuomi dead. “I was just planning on drugging him and spending the night with him,” Dahmer said of Tuomi’s death. “I had no intention of hurting him. When I woke up in the morning, he had a broken rib [and] I was heavily bruised. Apparently I had beaten him to death with my fists.” ↩︎
3. Dahmer’s victims ranged from 14 to 32-years-old. He claimed he had thought the 14-year-old Konerak was in his late teens, and it was elsewhere noted that 14-year-old James Doxtator had looked a little older. Dahmer also claimed he hadn’t known 13-year-old Somsak (the minor he was charged with molesting in 1988) was underage. Somsak maintained he had told Dahmer his age soon after they’d met, while more minors came forward as victims of Dahmer’s drugging. Though Dahmer usually vocalised a preference for men in their early to mid 20s, it was 32-year-old Ricky Beeks whom Dahmer was so taken by that he sought to consume him during his first instance of cannibalism. It’s therefore clear that, while Dahmer may have voiced a preference for men of a certain young (but legal) age, once actually faced with any male who fit his type, age was of little actual importance or concern. Even to the point of not considering the rammifications of contact with minors ↩︎
4. Tracy Edwards was an exception to Dahmer’s usual M.O of drugging and strangling a victim. Edwards’ growing unease around Dahmer had led to him becoming savvy about not accepting a drink from his host and, as such, he did not slip into the same fate at 17 men before him. He was fully conscious when Dahmer placed a handcuff on his wrist, held a knife to his chest and held him captive in Apartment 213 for four hours. Dahmer osscilated between a threatening lucidity and rocking backwards and forwards, fixated on Exorcist III. Edwards eventually managed to strike a blow to Dahmer’s head and run out of the apartment, flagging down two cops and bringing Dahmer’s 13-year killing spree to an end ↩︎